{"id":1988,"date":"2019-05-29T13:28:24","date_gmt":"2019-05-29T17:28:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=1988"},"modified":"2019-05-29T13:28:24","modified_gmt":"2019-05-29T17:28:24","slug":"confederacy-today-america-tomorrow-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2019\/05\/confederacy-today-america-tomorrow-plan.html","title":{"rendered":"The Confederacy Today, America Tomorrow: The Plan"},"content":{"rendered":"

While on Hugh Hewitt\u2019s nationally syndicated radio show recently, Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg admitted<\/a> that he favored removing Thomas Jefferson\u2019s name from events.<\/p>\n

Buttigieg was specifically asked about the removal of the names of Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson from the Democratic Party\u2019s annual dinner events.\u00a0 He responded that it \u201cwas the right thing to do,\u201d for both men were purveyors of \u201cracism,\u201d an evil that \u201cisn\u2019t some curiosity out of the past\u201d but which is \u201calive,\u201d \u201cwell,\u201d and \u201churting people [.]\u201d<\/p>\n

Buttigieg said that \u201cone of the main reasons to be in politics today is to try to change or reverse harms\u201d produced by racism and slavery.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a few critical points that must be made.<\/p>\n

First, it should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying the least bit of attention to American politics and who has the will and ability to do just the slightest bit of critical thinking that mainstream Democrats are now objecting to monuments to such American Founders as Jefferson.<\/p>\n

The 20th<\/sup> century conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott wrote in his memorable essay, \u201cRationalism in Politics,\u201d that, our self-delusions aside, political-morality does not consist of the \u201capplication<\/em>\u201d of eternal, immutable, premeditated \u201cprinciples<\/em>\u201d to \u201cproblems\u201d presented by ever-changing social circumstances.\u00a0 Rather, it is tradition<\/em> that always \u201cintimates<\/em>\u201d possibilities for its development.<\/p>\n

Consider it like this: The life of a society at any given moment is comprised of practices and modes of thinking\u2014\u201ctrends,\u201d we can call them for our purposes\u2014that point more strongly in some directions than in others.<\/p>\n

This being the case, we should now be able to discern that once Americans tolerated attacks on such American stalwarts as Robert E. Lee, they implicitly put the anti-American cultural cleansers on notice that they would tolerate as well attacks on America\u2019s Founders.<\/p>\n

If such white Southern secessionists as Robert E. Lee, Thomas \u201cStonewall\u201d Jackson, and Jefferson Davis deserve to be vilified for having promoted \u201cracism,\u201d then that much more deserving of vilification are such white Southern secessionists as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.\u00a0 By any objective measure, these three American presidents\u2014Washington, the Father of our country; Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence; and Madison, the author of the United States Constitution\u2014were significantly more \u201cracist\u201d than Lee, Jackson, and Davis.<\/p>\n

Washington owned well over 300 slaves by the time that he died.\u00a0 Jefferson is speculated to have owned over 600 throughout his life, and he didn\u2019t free any of his slaves even in his death.\u00a0 Madison owned over 100 slaves.<\/p>\n

The most vocal apologists for the Founders\u2014who are almost always one and the same people as those who either tolerate or contribute to attacks on Confederate heroes\u2014can be counted upon to defend the Founders by noting that they did in fact recognize slavery as an evil.\u00a0 This, supposedly, essentially gets them off of the hook and renders them worthy as objects of reverence.<\/p>\n

Yet the heroes of the Confederacy like Lee, Jackson, and Davis also condemned slavery in the harshest of terms.\u00a0 They too blasted it as an evil.\u00a0 However, they are treated with no such leniency.<\/p>\n

The point is this: Americans, particularly self-proclaimed conservatives, who insist upon acquiescing to attacks on the Southern secessionists of the second half of the 19th<\/sup> century have no one but themselves to blame for the attacks that are now being launched against the Southern secessionists of the last quarter of the 18th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

And because the attacks on the Confederacy never had anything to do with the Confederacy, because they have always been Ground Zero in the left\u2019s larger campaign to \u201cfundamentally transform\u201d\u2014to destroy\u2014America, we should expect that once Confederate monuments were safely disposed of, the cultural cleansers would turn their attention to previously untouchable targets, like America\u2019s Founders.<\/p>\n

Second, to know exactly the mindset of the anti-American virtue-signaler we should pose to him the following question:<\/p>\n

Which is more immoral, the enslavement of Africans<\/strong> in America, the conquest of the American Indian <\/strong>by the European settlers, or the Holocaust<\/strong>?<\/em><\/p>\n

This question hurls the Buttigieges of the world onto the horns of a dilemma\u2014and there is no slipping between these horns.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, if the virtue-signaler attempts to identify one of these people\u2019s experience as worse than that of the other two, he or she<\/em> would run the very real risk of being depicted as racially insensitive or outright \u201cracist\u201d toward the other two.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, in saying something to the effect that each of these events is equally horrible<\/em>, etc. the Buttigieges reveal that, from their perspective, the men who settled and founded America are morally no different than Adolph Hitler and his Nazis.<\/p>\n

And if the men and women who settled and founded America are no different than Hitler and his Nazis, then neither are Americans <\/em>like you and I who continue to celebrate the men and women who settled and founded America any different from Nazis.<\/p>\n

This, in turn, brings us to the final point.<\/p>\n

Third, the American Flag is the moral equivalent (or worse) of the Swastika.\u00a0 As such, it deserves to be treated with the contempt owed to the latter.<\/p>\n

And consider: If the Stars and Bars needed to be removed from the public square because the Confederate Flag flew over the institution of slavery for four years<\/em>, then the Stars and Stripes, which flew atop slave ships and over a country where slavery persisted for an exponentially longer period of time, should be set aflame.<\/p>\n

Yet it isn\u2019t just the flag that needs to be retired: The very name of America <\/em>should be as well.<\/p>\n

After all, America is named after the Italian explorer\u2014the white, <\/em>Italian explorer\u2014Amerigo Vespucci, a contemporary of Christopher Columbus.\u00a0 What\u2019s worse, it was a German Christian cleric\u2014a white, <\/em>German Christian cleric\u2014named Waldseemuller who honored Vespucci\u2019s accomplishments by naming the New World after him.<\/p>\n

Since, though, America is, as another Democratic presidential candidate put it, a \u201ccrime scene\u201d inasmuch as it the place in which Africans were enslaved and those formerly known as American Indians were \u201cexterminated,\u201d it would seem that racial justice requires that the country relinquish its name, which can\u2019t but serve as a perpetual reminder to blacks and reds of the unrelenting oppression to which they\u2019ve been subjected for hundreds of years.<\/p>\n

We could continue endlessly in this same vein. The point, ultimately, is that by the logic of the contemporary leftist, like Pete Buttigieg, there can be no principled justification for resisting the foregoing proposals.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s time that the self-styled enemies of monuments to the Confederacy be forced to reckon with the inescapable implications of their anti-American ideology.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While on Hugh Hewitt\u2019s nationally syndicated radio show recently, Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg admitted that he favored removing Thomas Jefferson\u2019s name from events. Buttigieg was specifically asked about the removal of the names of Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson from the Democratic Party\u2019s annual dinner events.\u00a0 He responded that it \u201cwas the right thing…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Confederacy Today, America Tomorrow: The Plan<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2019\/05\/confederacy-today-america-tomorrow-plan.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Confederacy Today, America Tomorrow: The Plan\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"While on Hugh Hewitt\u2019s nationally syndicated radio show recently, Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg admitted that he favored removing Thomas Jefferson\u2019s name from events. 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